Farina armour: the protection that did not protect

I am reading Un anno sull'Altipiano by Emilio Lussu, literally One Year on the High Plateau, translated into English under titles such as Sardinian Brigade. It is his memoir of a year at war with the Sassari Brigade on the Asiago plateau, between June 1916 and July 1917. Among the pages that stay with you is the one about Farina armour: soldiers encased in steel plates, sent against the Austrian wire, convinced, or forced to pretend they were convinced, that they were protected.

They were not. This article tries to reconstruct what that armour really was: who designed it, how it was made, what it promised and why it failed. And it compares Lussu's account with what the objects preserved in museums tell us, because the two versions do not match, and the difference is interesting.

The problem: barbed wire and the machine gun

To understand Farina armour, you have to start with the problem it was meant to solve.

When Italy entered the war in May 1915, the front was already trench warfare. In front of the Austro-Hungarian lines ran belts of barbed wire, often several metres deep. Behind them were rifles and machine guns aimed at exactly the spot where an attacker had to stop to get through.

Wire was a simple and terrible weapon: it did not kill, but it stopped you. And a man standing still in front of a machine gun is a dead man.

There were three ways to open a gap:

• artillery, which often failed to cut the wire, merely shifting it or burying it intact;
• explosive charges, such as tubes of gelignite pushed under the wire and detonated;
• wire cutters, meaning men crawling up to the wire and cutting it by hand, one strand at a time.

The last two required someone to reach the enemy wire. In the Italian army, the groups given this task took a name everyone understood: compagnie della morte, the companies of death. They were small squads, often made up of engineers, who mostly worked at night. Lussu describes these attempts in the chapters leading up to the armour episode, which is also where Zio Francesco, the oldest soldier in the company, dies.

The engineers' question was obvious: what if those men could be protected?

The engineer Ferruccio Farina

The best-known answer came from Milan. Ferruccio Farina was an engineer whose firm, based at Via Ruffini 10 according to the labels of surviving helmets, made personal steel protection. The same firm also produced other models, such as the Corsi armour.

The mood of the time was one of great faith in such solutions. On 11 July 1915 La Domenica del Corriere devoted a cover to the Corsi armour, presenting it as the only kind able to repel and shatter the bullet of the Model 1891 rifle (University of Padua, WarWon archive). It was the promise the public wanted to hear: technology would save the soldiers from the slaughter.

How the armour was made

According to the Italian Wikipedia entry, which cites the work of Raito and Persegati, Farina body armour consisted of:

• a trapezoid breastplate made of five layers of nickel-chrome steel;
• two movable shoulder guards;
• two straps crossed behind the back and tied in front;
• two internal handles, which allowed the plate to be removed and used as a shield.

The body armour alone weighed more than nine kilograms. A catalogue record from the Emilia-Romagna cultural heritage database gives about 9.25 kg (record from the "A. Crespellani" civic archaeological museum, Valsamoggia).

The helmet

The Farina helmet is the most recognisable item of the whole kit, with its tall, massive shape and a front plate reinforced with several riveted layers of steel. It had no padding: it was worn over a cap or a balaclava.

Its weight varied with model and size. The Emilia-Romagna record gives about 2.25 kg for the tall model and 1.85 kg for the low one; an example at the Imperial War Museum in London is listed at 2.85 kg. For comparison, the French Adrian helmet, adopted by the Italian army at the end of 1915 and the basis for the Italian 1916 model, weighed between 670 and 750 grams.

Farina helmets were the first steel helmets issued to Italian troops, in October 1915, but in very small numbers. They never replaced the standard-issue helmet.

The promise and the reality

The maker certified the armour against the 6.5 mm round of the Italian Carcano Model 91 rifle, fired from a minimum distance of 125 metres.

It is a precise guarantee, and precisely for that reason it reveals its limits:

• distance. Nobody fought at 125 metres in front of the wire. Whoever reached the wire to cut it was, by definition, a few metres from the enemy trench;
• calibre. Austro-Hungarian weapons, from the Mannlicher rifle to the Schwarzlose machine gun, fired an 8 mm round, heavier and more powerful than the one used for testing;
• coverage. The armour protected the torso and head. Legs, arms and flanks remained exposed;
• weight. With ten or twelve kilograms of steel on, a man could not run, crawl nimbly or take cover quickly.

Historians' verdict is harsh. The armour was an auxiliary protection, not a decisive one, and it often ended up turning its wearer into a slow, easily spotted target.

Lussu's account

In chapter XIV of One Year on the High Plateau, Lussu describes the use of Farina armour in the fighting on the plateau. After failed attempts with gelignite tubes and wire cutters, command gives a group of armoured volunteers the task of reaching the Austrian wire. They fall before getting there.

I will not reproduce his pages here; they deserve to be read in full. But one short sentence interests me, because it is a piece of data: Lussu writes that the armour "should not have weighed less than fifty kilos" (in the original, "non dovevano pesare meno di cinquanta chili").

This is where my profession meets my reading.

Witness and document do not match

Museum records speak of just over nine kilograms for the body armour and two or three for the helmet. Lussu estimates fifty. Even adding the rest of the equipment, the gap is huge.

Who is right? Probably both, each in his own way.

Lussu does not write "they weighed fifty kilos": he writes that they should not have weighed less. It is an estimate, not a measurement, and the very form of the sentence says so. Several things may lie behind that estimate, and none can be proven with certainty:

• perception. A man who must advance under fire with a steel plate on him does not feel nine kilograms: he feels the impossibility of moving;
• observation at a distance. An officer watching the volunteers advance with effort, clumsy and slow, infers a weight from their movement;
• time. Lussu wrote the book in 1936–1937, in exile, in a sanatorium at Clavadel above Davos, twenty years after the events;
• models. Different types of protection were in circulation, and it cannot be ruled out that the equipment Lussu saw was heavier than the models that survive.

I do not think Lussu's figure is a mistake to be corrected. It is information of a different kind: it does not say how much the steel weighed, it says how much it weighed to go into an assault wearing that steel. For a historian, and for an investigator, the lesson is the same: testimony must always be checked against documents, but the comparison is not only there to disprove it. It is there to understand what the testimony is really telling us.

The armour after the war: films, museums, video games

Farina armour also entered popular imagination through cinema. In 1970 Francesco Rosi adapted Un anno sull'Altipiano into the film Uomini contro (Many Wars Ago), starring Gian Maria Volonté. The film mentions the armour, but mangles the name as "Fasina", and the armour on screen is not a Farina: it is an American model, the Brewster Body Shield.

The armour also appears in the video game Battlefield 1, where its protective ability is invented.

Original examples are now museum and collector's pieces. According to specialist dealers' records, Farina protection was also supplied, in very small numbers, to Belgian forces.

What Farina armour teaches us

Farina armour is the portrait of a precise moment in the First World War: the moment when people still believed that a tactical problem, wire under machine-gun fire, could be solved with an object. A thick enough plate, and the men would get through.

It was not enough. The problem was not a lack of steel, but the order to attack in those conditions. It is the same theme that runs through Lussu's whole book: distant commanders, orders that ignore the reality of the ground, men sent to die to test a hypothesis.

There is also a lesson that goes beyond military history. A certification only states what was tested: the armour stopped a certain round at a certain distance, and nothing more. Reading guarantees for what they actually say, not for what they promise, is still a useful exercise today, whether for a product, a supplier or anyone who assures you of certain results.

If you are interested in the period, the archive also covers the history of the Enigma machine and Cold War espionage techniques. And if you are reconstructing the story of a relative who fought in the Great War, historical research is one of the services I offer to individuals, institutions and scholars.

The book cited: Emilio Lussu, Un anno sull'Altipiano, written in 1936–1937 and first published in Paris in 1938; in Italy by Einaudi from 1945. The Farina armour episode is in chapter XIV.